Growing up in the United States, Chloe Ardelia Wofford and her family struggled with racial prejudice. Her father was forced to flee his hometown on account of widespread lynchings of the members of the African-American community. A few years later, a landlord set fire to their house in Lorain, Ohio, because they could not pay the rent. While in college, she witnessed segregation in restaurants and buses. Wofford, who later changed her name to Toni Morrison, wrote about his African-American experience, particularly from a female perspective and became known as the champion of oppressed communities.
Her 1977 novel ‘Song of Solomon’ is one of her major novels. The book not only won the National Books Critics Award, but was also cited by the Swedish Academy in awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Her novel ‘Beloved’ inspired by the life of the escaped slave Margaret Garner was a critical success. The novel was later adapted into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel ‘Beloved’ in 1988.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her novels “which characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University, in 1958. They had two sons and later divorced in 1964. Her son, Slade Morrison, worked with her on several books and literary projects.
Slade Morrison died of pancreatic cancer on December 22, 2010, at the age of 45.
Toni Morrison died of pneumonia on 5 August 2019, at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, at the age of 88.
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